Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian gets the James Franco treatment

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”

Now, you might wel​l have seen this already, especially if you're a big Cormac McCarthy and/or James Franco fan, but we only just came across it and couldn't resist sharing.

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”

Now, you might wel​l have seen this already, especially if you're a big Cormac McCarthy and/or James Franco fan, but we only just came across it and couldn't resist sharing.

Blood Meridian is a brutal, brilliant book, set in a world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. It's a novel that requires a strong stomach to read. James Franco has gone one step further and visualised it in all its glory in this thirty minute film.

Writing for vice.com, he said: 'In some ways Blood seems un-filmable. It is almost Biblical in its prose. His terse prose utilizes vocabulary only found in the crannies of annals of the Old West and the specialized spheres of working men. He captures the slang of forgotten peoples so deftly, it’s as if they were his barroom friends.'

We think he's done a pretty good job of it - the desert winds whistle nonchalantly through every scene and that Biblical prose is spoken with wonderful simplicity. You can check out the video over here on vice.com, along with Franco's full introduction to the film short: